Once again a study has been published about the purported benefits of preschool. The title of many articles that have followed are something like this: Long term study of preschool says better grad rate, less drug use, fewer arrests for children enrolled.” Sounds good. The newest study, published in the online version of Science, isn’t much different from a Rand Corp. study from years ago, and more recently, or other studies done about the effects of preschool.

If you stop at just the title of the article, or don’t read it thoroughly, you might come away thinking that preschool for all is a cure all for all. It isn’t.

“To cut crime, raise education and income levels, and reduce addiction rates among the poor, no program offers more bang for the buck than preschool, as a new study published in Science demonstrates.” Again, sounds pretty good.

Read a bit further, either in the actual study, or the Time article, and one discovers this:

The children in the study were from the “…lowest-income neighborhoods of Chicago, where nearly 40% of residents live below the poverty line; most of the children were African American.”

This study, like the Rand Corp. (where Chicago was also the area of the study) and other studies, says that children from an impoverished inner city life who went to a “quality” preschool did marginally better than children from the same situation who did not attend a “quality” preschool.

According to the study, the preschool children, 900 of them, had a better graduation from high school rate, a better college acceptance rate, had fewer drug, including alcohol, problems, and fewer arrests, than the control group of 500. It is not a spectacular difference, but any positive difference is good.

The problem isn’t that this study, like the others, will be used in the push for mandatory universal preschool as a panacea for all that ails the national school system and the nation in general. Carefully chosen snippets will be trotted out by various politicians and other hucksters to support their particular school reform package of the day. They can’t help themselves. They smell money.

The real issue isn’t addressed. Preschool, no matter how good, solves nothing. The impoverished communities still exist, the drug infested, squalid houses still exist. Embedded unemployment, constant crime, still exist. A lack of hope for a better life still exists.

With these kinds of issues facing inner-city children and their families every day, the best preschool experience in the known universe won’t overcome the effects of poverty. There doesn’t seem to be anyone willing to put the effort into actually addressing the underlying issues that seem to relegate some children to a clearly difficult life.

Chicago isn’t alone in high poverty inner-city problems. Every state, every city, has it’s own version of the kinds of neighborhoods that the children in the study come from.

It will take a national effort to make any kind of a dent in the multiple ravages that drug addiction, split families, single parent families, and multi-generaltional poverty produce.

The Eduskeptic is forever skeptical of studies like this one, and the others, simply because they are used to further the mistaken notion that their conclusions are applicable to the general population. One simply cannot extrapolate the information and apply it broadly to all children. It simply doesn’t work.

This is not to say that a very good preschool can’t help children get ready for their first few years in the public school system. They can, and do. What they won’t, and can’t do, is solve the basic problems that so many very young children face as a reality every day in poverty stricken areas of our country.